What change would you introduce in the current educational system?

As a college graduate, I have received more than 15 years of formal education in China, from primary, secondary to higher education. On my path of intellectual growth, what impresses me the most is a variety of pop, midterm, final, and national exams. As our abilities are measured more by test scores in the current educational situation, the form and effectiveness of the test are of great concern to me. If I could make any changes, I would suggest that the multiple choice test not be used much in school.

First of all, the multiple choice test makes it easy for students to cheat. When students just need to answer by marking some letters or drawing some circles, students can copy their neighbors answer very easily. Even if the teachers separate them far apart, the students can still invent secret codes to pass the message. For example, some students used to admit that they had created such a system: touching the right means A, touching the eyes means B, touching the nose means C, and touching the mouth or chin means D. There is no point in giving a test if students can share their answers so easily.

Second, the multiple choice test encourages guessing. According to the law of possibility, if there are four options for a question, then the probability of getting the correct answer by guessing randomly will be up to 25 percent. Even if a person is absolutely ignorant of the knowledge of that subject, when taking the multiple choice test, he is likely to get about 25 percent of the correct answers just by guessing. Furthermore, sometimes teachers who are not so well trained in test design can use some options that are obviously wrong, and this makes guessing even easier. Due to this feature, some students just rely on luck instead of hard work to pass the exam. A test is equally useless if it turns students into opportunists instead of learners.

Lastly and most importantly, the multiple choice test cannot access many of the important skills that are taught. Because it only requires students to make decisions, this test form can only test students’ ability to recognize certain information, but not their ability to analyze and produce information. But these latter skills are just as important, if not more so, than the ability to tell right from wrong. Therefore, a high score on a multiple choice test does not guarantee a real high ability to solve real problems. With such a lack, we can again question the frequent use of this test format.

It is true that the multiple choice test can give us efficiency and accuracy in scoring, but the above analysis indicates that it is not perfect or effective in many ways. Therefore, we must remember its flaws and limit its use so that students can be evaluated fairly and scientifically.